Field
This disclosure is generally related to pre-loading a content cache. More specifically, this disclosure is related to generating a recommendation of content objects to pre-load into the content cache, based on their correlation to content objects being requested by one or more client devices.
Related Art
Advances in cloud computing are making it easier and less expensive to provide online content to a plurality of client devices across the Internet. This online content can include executable instructions and data that implement a web-based service and/or can include a media stream that may require a high data bandwidth. A system administrator or service provider may deploy a set of web servers to host the online content, and may deploy a plurality of cache servers across a plurality of geographic locations to serve the content to the client devices. As more users sign up with the online service, the system administrator can deploy additional cache servers to improve performance to the client devices.
However, cache servers are oftentimes designed to cache only data that is most-frequently or most recently requested by the client devices. This improves the request response time for popular data, which makes the web service responsive to requests from most client devices. Unfortunately, when a client device issues a request for unpopular data, it is likely that this unpopular data has not been cached at a cache server, which can result in an undesirably long request response time. For example, a movie-streaming service may store popular movies on various cache servers, which allows the movie-streaming service to provide the movie to client devices in a high-definition format. However, if a user desires to watch a movie that is not currently popular, the movie-streaming service may need to service this movie directly from a server configured to handle unpopular content or a slower machine with direct access to the full content catalogue. The streaming performance from the media-storage server to the client device may be inferior to that from a cache server, which can result in buffering issues during content playback, or may require the media-storage server to stream a lower-resolution version of the media stream.